Free housing could be way to help teacher salaries go further
Kristen Calderon was making about $37,000 a year as an early childhood educator in New Haven, Connecticut. It was more than the state’s average salary for the job but given the high cost of housing, it was barely enough.
“Every month, I had to decide on a rotating basis which bill I wasn’t going to pay,” she said.
But recently, all that changed.
In 2021, she moved into free housing provided by her employer, the Friends Center for Children. And in October, she will move into a newly constructed house, just minutes away from her workplace. She will not be required to pay rent, only utilities.
The new home, which Calderon, 39, and her 9-year-old son will share with another family, is one of several in the works. Eventually, the Friends Center program aims to provide free housing to about 24 early childhood teachers and their families.
The homes are part of an unusual experiment: an effort to improve the quality of life for early childhood educators and increase their buying power, without raising tuition costs for parents.
“It’s a sense of security,” Calderon said — the first that she and her son have had in a long time.
As the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns showed, early childhood educators are necessary for the rest of the economy to thrive. To work outside their homes, parents need someone reliable to watch and teach their young children.
But teachers will not stay in jobs that do not allow them to pay the bills. And child care centers have trouble paying good wages without making the cost unaffordable.
Cities and states across the country are wrestling with the same challenge — and coming up with a range of solutions.
The Connecticut housing program is probably not replicable on a large scale — at least not yet — because the funding to make it happen came largely through charitable donations.
First-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture designed and built the first home as part of their required coursework. Many materials were donated.
But Allyx Schiavone, the executive director of the Friends Center, hopes the idea will spread, serving as a model for government officials looking for creative ways to address the state’s affordable housing crisis — and the nationwide failure to pay skilled early childhood teachers enough to survive, and to stay in the profession.
Just a few blocks from one of the Friends Center facilities, the new homes will eventually form a campus on a 2-acre lot. They will face inward and cluster around a sprawling evergreen bush. Calderon’s new home is a modern, two-story gray building. Another educator, Paris Pierce, lives next door with her three children, in an existing house on the property.
Each home will be built for two families, who will live on separate floors but share a kitchen. To design the homes, the Yale architecture students spoke frequently with Calderon and her colleagues, adjusting the design around their needs.
For instance, the students widened the foyers, adding large closets and room for strollers. They also made the living rooms smaller and made room for two refrigerators and two sets of cabinets, so that each family could have its own storage space.
For Pierce, who moved into her free home about a year ago, saving money on rent means being able to put her two older children into extracurricular activities. Her 11-yearold son loves soccer. Her 5-year-old daughter is into dancing.